#neilpostman — Public Fediverse posts

Divertirse hasta morir – Neil Postman (1985)

https://fsolt.es/2026/07/divertirse-hasta-morir-neil-postman-1985/

Divertirse hasta morir – Neil Postman (1985)

https://fsolt.es/2026/07/divertirse-hasta-morir-neil-postman-1985/

“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation”*…

Matt Pearce revisits Neil Postman‘s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology…

In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).

How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.

ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. [In the example above, ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters.]

Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.

Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”…

… I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.

Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:

In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.

Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.

To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”

Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.

Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”

In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:

From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.

Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this…

Read on for how we might — dare one suggest, should— act: “A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this,” from @mattdpearce.com.

Compare to/contrast with with Yuval Avnar‘s riff on Pascal’s musing on the implications of his invention, the “arithmetic machine” (an early, if not the first, modern mechanical calculator): “The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn’t Worry. Neither Should You.“

* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

###

As we introspect, we might send pointed birthday greetings to Ambrose Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. His satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary was named as one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.  His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction.  For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.  S. T. Joshi argues that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire.  His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others; and he was an influential and feared literary critic.  In recent decades Bierce has gained even wider regard as a fabulist and for his poetry.

In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared over the border and was never seen again. 

Apropos the piece featured above:

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

– The Devil’s Dictionary

source

“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation”*…

Matt Pearce revisits Neil Postman‘s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology…

In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).

How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.

ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. [In the example above, ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters.]

Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.

Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”…

… I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.

Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:

In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.

Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.

To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”

Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.

Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”

In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:

From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.

Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this…

Read on for how we might — dare one suggest, should— act: “A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this,” from @mattdpearce.com.

Compare to/contrast with with Yuval Avnar‘s riff on Pascal’s musing on the implications of his invention, the “arithmetic machine” (an early, if not the first, modern mechanical calculator): “The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn’t Worry. Neither Should You.“

* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

###

As we introspect, we might send pointed birthday greetings to Ambrose Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. His satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary was named as one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.  His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction.  For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.  S. T. Joshi argues that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire.  His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others; and he was an influential and feared literary critic.  In recent decades Bierce has gained even wider regard as a fabulist and for his poetry.

In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared over the border and was never seen again. 

Apropos the piece featured above:

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

– The Devil’s Dictionary

source

You can be an influencer doing anything on algo social media if you're attractive or crazy, for the same reason tabloids exist in the supermarket checkout line. Our lizard brain gives it a few seconds of attention. The robots can track this and will then send more of this content at us. It's profiting off human weakness. Entertaining ourselves to death.

#algos #NeilPostman #TabloidCulture #influencers

You can be an influencer doing anything on algo social media if you're attractive or crazy, for the same reason tabloids exist in the supermarket checkout line. Our lizard brain gives it a few seconds of attention. The robots can track this and will then send more of this content at us. It's profiting off human weakness. Entertaining ourselves to death.

#algos #NeilPostman #TabloidCulture #influencers

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.
-- Neil Postman

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #NeilPostman #Technology

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunset #Florida

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.
-- Neil Postman

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #NeilPostman #Technology

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunset #Florida

@Sascha @markus_netzpolitik

@Sascha @markus_netzpolitik

Plattform ist ein witziger Begriff, wenn er als Verb verwendet wird: etwas, im Kontext hier zB Inhalte oder Kommunikation, plattformen. In meiner Kolumne im Blog von @campact: https://www.campact.de/blog/2026/02/neonazi-hack-social-plattformen/

Zum TV-Gerät, Flachbildfernseher früher, gibt es die schöne Note, dass Fernsehgeräte die einzige Technik sind, die sich den Inhalten anpasst: sie werden immer flacher. Ist das von #NeilPostman?

@Sascha @markus_netzpolitik

@Sascha @markus_netzpolitik

Plattform ist ein witziger Begriff, wenn er als Verb verwendet wird: etwas, im Kontext hier zB Inhalte oder Kommunikation, plattformen. In meiner Kolumne im Blog von @campact: https://www.campact.de/blog/2026/02/neonazi-hack-social-plattformen/

Zum TV-Gerät, Flachbildfernseher früher, gibt es die schöne Note, dass Fernsehgeräte die einzige Technik sind, die sich den Inhalten anpasst: sie werden immer flacher. Ist das von #NeilPostman?

I friend sent me a clipping with this #quote...

"Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged on the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue." -- Henry Giroux (The Terror of the Unforeseen)

I was unfamiliar with both the book and the author. His bibliography reminds me a bit of #NeilPostman.

#HenryGiroux #Book Willful #Ignorance of #America & #Americans

I friend sent me a clipping with this #quote...

"Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged on the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue." -- Henry Giroux (The Terror of the Unforeseen)

I was unfamiliar with both the book and the author. His bibliography reminds me a bit of #NeilPostman.

#HenryGiroux #Book Willful #Ignorance of #America & #Americans

I just read this excellent article on the Fediverse by @_elena. It clearly outlines some of its advantages and uses good analogies, but also discusses some of the challenges. It's worth reading!

https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-new-way-to-describe-the-fediverse-and-its-opposition-to-big-tech/

#SocialMedia #Fediverse #BigTech #Decentralization #NeilPostman

🎭 Oh, so you're not just tired, you're in an existential crisis! 🤔 Thanks, Neil, for reminding us that our mundane struggles are actually just a lack of cosmic purpose. 🌌 Because clearly, it's not the endless Zoom calls or late-night emails, but a Nietzschean void that's leaving us unfulfilled. 🌀
https://neilthanedar.com/youre-not-burnt-out-youre-existentially-starving/ #existentialcrisis #cosmicpurpose #nihilism #modernstruggles #NeilPostman #Zoomfatigue #HackerNews #ngated

Die Menschen in Schöne neue Welt leiden nicht daran, daß sie lachen, statt nachzudenken, sondern daran, daß sie nicht wissen, worüber sie lachen und warum sie aufgehört haben, nachzudenken.« 5/6 #NeilPostman

»Heute wissen wir, daß Sesam Straße die Kinder nur dann ermuntert, die Schule zu lieben, wenn es in der Schule zugeht wie in Sesam Straße.« #NeilPostman Wie soll Schule heute auf die TikTok-Kids reagieren?

- und ohne auf Widerspruch zu treffen. An Huxley, und nicht an Orwell, sollten wir uns deshalb halten, wenn wir verstehen wollen, auf welche Weise das Fernsehen und andere Bildformen die Grundlage der freiheitlichen Demokratie, nämlich die Informationsfreiheit, bedrohen.« 3/3 #NeilPostman

»Kurz: So wie sich der Werbespot im Fernsehen, um seine psychologische Arbeit leisten zu können, aller authentischen Informationen über das Produkt entledigt, so entledigt sich – und zwar aus demselben Grund – die Image-Politik aller authentischen politischen Substanz.« #NeilPostman

»Vielleicht geht es zu weit, wenn man sagt, der »prominente« Politiker habe die politischen Parteien bedeutungslos gemacht. Doch zweifellos gibt es einen Zusammenhang zwischen dem Aufstieg des prominenten Politikers und dem Niedergang der Parteien.« #NeilPostman

Daß die Verteidigung des nicht zu Verteidigenden als Amüsement betrieben werden könnte, kam ihm nicht in den Sinn. Er fürchtete im Politiker den Betrüger, nicht den Entertainer.« 3/3 #NeilPostman

»Wenn die Politik dem Showbusiness gleicht, dann kommt es nicht darauf an, überragende Leistungen, Klarheit und Redlichkeit anzustreben, sondern darauf, den Eindruck zu erwecken, man täte es – und das ist etwas ganz anderes.« #NeilPostman

Die Nachrichten entlocken uns eine Vielfalt von Meinungen, mit denen wir nur eines tun können – sie wiederum als Stoff für weitere Nachrichten anbieten, mit denen wir ebenfalls nichts anfangen können. …« 4/4 #NeilPostman (1985)

»Vielleicht sind wir inzwischen tatsächlich an dem Punkt angelangt, wo nicht mehr die Programmatik, sondern die Kosmetik das Gebiet ist, auf dem sich der Politiker wirklich auskennen muß.« #NeilPostman

Huxley befürchtete, daß die Wahrheit in einem Meer von Belanglosigkeit untergehen könnte. … Dieses Buch handelt von der Möglichkeit, daß Huxley und nicht Orwell recht hatte.« 2/2 #NeilPostman: »Wie amüsieren uns zu Tode« (1985; dt. 1988)

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.
-- Neil Postman

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #NeilPostman #Technology

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #PuebloBonito #Ruins #NewMexico

If all the secrets of adulthood, including sex, illness and death, are opened to children; cynicism, apathy or arrogance replace curiosity for them, short-circuiting education and moral development.
-- Neil Postman (The Disappearance of Childhood)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #NeilPostman #Apathy #Arrogance #Cynicism #Education #Television

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Kayaks #Everglades #Florida

»Vielleicht sind wir inzwischen tatsächlich an dem Punkt angelangt, wo nicht mehr die Programmatik, sondern die Kosmetik das Gebiet ist, auf dem sich der Politiker wirklich auskennen muß.« #NeilPostman

Würde #NeilPostman noch leben, dann wäre ein möglicher Buchtitel: »Wir posten uns zu Tode« … und auf dem Buchrücken könnte man vielleicht lesen: »Das Internet wurde nicht für Idioten erschaffen – es erzeugt sie.“

" #Orwell craignait qu'on ne nous cache la vérité. #Huxley redoutait que la vérité ne soit noyée dans un océan d'insignifiances.

Orwell craignait que notre #culture ne soit prisonnière. Huxley redoutait que notre culture ne devienne triviale, seulement préoccupée de fadaises [...]."

cf tv realité tiktoc #socialmedia #fakenews communautarisme

#NeilPostman #citation #sedistraireaenmourir #georgeorwell #AldousHuxley

" #Orwell craignait ceux qui interdisaient les #livres, #Huxley redoutait qu'il n'y ait même plus besoin d'interdire les livres, car plus personne n'aurait #envie d'en #lire.

Orwell craignait ceux qui nous priveraient de l' #information. Huxley redoutait qu'on ne nous en abreuve au point que nous en soyons réduits à la passivité et à l'égoïsme."

cf https://mastodon.social/@cobrate/113220175592611462

#NeilPostman #citation #sedistraireaenmourir #georgeorwell #AldousHuxley

Technology

We need technology to live, as we need food to live. But, of course, if we eat too much food, or eat food that has no nutritional value, or eat food that is infected with disease, we turn a means of survival into its opposite. The same is true for technology.

~ Neil Postman

slip:4a1075.